[PW] Re: The Evolution of Creationism (Timothy PWEE)

[John Franklin]

On Oct 2, 2006, at 12:26 PM, Michael Biltz wrote:

> Most IDers do have religious and political motivations, but the  
> theory itself is stripped of religious trappings.

Only superficially. It says, in essence, that something complex  
cannot arise spontaneously, so there must have been a designer. This  
designer must have been complex as well, or else the complexity arose  
spontaneously at the step where the designer designed, which the  
IDers deny can occur. The same logic then applies to this designer,  
if necessary, stretching back as many steps as you like. At no time  
can a complex designer arise spontaneously.

The universe presumably has a finite age. Therefore, at some point,  
according to the IDers, there was at least one complex designer  
around when the universe came into being, which would require that  
said designer(s) be completely distinct from everything else in the  
universe (and, if the Big Bang theory is correct, exempt from the  
physics which govern everything else, since the conditions of the Big  
Bang would destroy any complex thing obeying the laws of physics).

Thus ID implies a complex designer which predates the universe and is  
not subject to physical laws, and is functionally identical to  
creationism.

> As a critic of the modern synthesis version of neo-Darwinism, but  
> not an endorser of ID, I think people should be aware of what is  
> known as the Salem hypothesis.  People with backgrounds in biology  
> and physics tend to support evolutionary theory, while folks with  
> backgrounds in math, engineering and computer science tend to doubt  
> it.  For example, check this article out:
> http://www.math.utep.edu/Faculty/sewell/articles/mathint.html

That's a really, really dumb article. (Oh, and by the way: my  
background is in math, with a side-hop to computer science. Evolution  
seems perfectly rational to me.) I won't bore everyone with a point- 
by-point refutation of it, but here's a representative bit:

> But the second law of thermodynamics--at least the underlying  
> principle behind this law--simply says that natural forces do not  
> cause extremely improbable things to happen**, and it is absurd to  
> argue that because the Earth receives energy from the Sun, this  
> principle was not violated here when the original rearrangement of  
> atoms into encyclopedias and computers occurred.

The footnote is:

> **An unfortunate choice of words, for which I was severely  
> chastised. I should have said, the underlying principle behind the  
> second law is that natural forces do not do macroscopically  
> describable things which are extremely improbable from the  
> microscopic point of view. See "A Second Look at the Second Law,"  
> for a more thorough treatment of this point.
If Sewell were really a good statistician, he would know that ANY  
specific outcome in such a situation is individually improbable.  
That's how the second law of thermodynamics works. If he doesn't know  
enough physics to know that, he has no business setting himself up as  
an expert commentator on science. Or probability.

To take a more comprehensible example than the entire planet: suppose  
you are playing a (fair) game of bridge. The dealer gives you 13  
cards -- a random, and simple, process. But any specific hand in  
bridge is staggeringly unlikely -- something like one chance in 3 x  
10^21. (You would be more likely to win the lottery in most states...  
heck, you would be more likely to win the grand prize in a lottery  
which you could only enter by winning the grand prize in the normal  
lottery.) Sewell is, in effect, saying "this hand of cards is  
staggeringly unlikely! The dealer must be cheating!"

-John Franklin